Mohammed Islam

• Doctor of Psychology
• Assistant Professor at Chicago State University

This brief report describes the first time a recovery home organization has both developed and evaluated an educational workshop aimed at encouraging the use of medication-assisted treatments (MATs) and NARCAN (naloxone) to prevent/reduce opioid overdoses. The one-hour program involving the use, misuse, and recovery potential of MATs and the opioid...

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a poorly understood chronic illness with many case definitions that disagree on key symptoms, including hypersensitivities to noise and lights. The aim of the current study was to understand the prevalence rates and characteristics of these symptoms amongst people with ME/CFS and to com...

Although social support is commonly investigated in the context of substance use recovery, researchers have widely neglected its multilevel nature, thus limiting what we know about its measurement across levels of observation. The current study used multilevel confirmatory factor analyses (MCFA) on 229 individuals living in 42 recovery homes to inv...

Objectives The Institute of Medicine (IOM 2015. Beyond Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Redefining an Illness. Washington: The National Academies Press) suggested new criteria for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), which requires an endorsement of either neurocognitive impairment or orthostatic intoleran...

Spiritually based interventions in the form of 12-step programs are frequently offered as a part of substance use treatment programs in the United States. Programs based on the 12 steps guarantee that by working their program, an individual will undergo a process of transformation labeled a spiritual awakening. However, the impact of this experienc...

Objectives: Studies have demonstrated immune dysfunction in adolescents with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS); however, evidence is varied. The current study used network analysis to examine relationships between cytokines among a sample of pediatric participants with ME/CFS. Methods: 10,119 youth aged 5-17 in the Chicago...

Replications and the sharing of data with other researchers have become an essential part of the scientific process, and it is an aspect of the social sciences that has grown exponentially over the last few decades and is now required for most federally funded studies. Unfortunately, there are few guidelines or narratives for unexpected complicatio...

This study aimed to contribute to the development of a research case definition for post-acute sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection (PASC) using a PASC data set and experiences from case definitions developed for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Our database included patients with PASC who provided self-report symptomology d...

Purpose: Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is an illness characterized by a variety of symptoms including post-exertional malaise, unrefreshing sleep, and cognitive impairment. A variety of case definitions (e.g., the Canadian Consensus Criteria (CCC), the Myalgic Encephalomyelitis International Consensus Criteria (ME-ICC...

Background: About 10% of individuals who contract infectious mononucleosis (IM) have symptoms 6 months later that meet criteria for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Our study for the first time examined whether it is possible to predict who will develop ME/CFS following IM. Methods: We have reported on a prospectively...

Those with substance use disorders living in recovery homes might be at-risk for Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) due to close living arrangements and past histories of substance use (as well as comorbid factors such as homelessness, psychiatric comorbidity, and chronic health conditions). This study compared COVID-19 infection and mortality rates fo...

Background Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) involves severe fatigue, unrefreshing sleep, and cognitive impairment, leading to functional difficulties; prior studies have not evaluated risk factors with behavioral and immune data collected prior to developing ME/CFS.. Up to 5% of university students develop infectious mono...

Some recovery homes have facilitating relationships and organizational characteristics, and there are also social capital differences among residents of these recovery homes. It is important to better understand the impact of protective and risk individual and house factors on recovery issues among residents of these community-based settings. Indiv...

Oxford Houses (OHs) are a large network of self‐run community‐based settings for individuals with substance use disorders. This present study explored a model based on conceptualizing recovery home social systems as dynamic multirelational (multiplex) social networks. The model is developed from data obtained from 42 OH recovery homes in three part...

Recovery homes may facilitate individuals with substance use disorders re-integration back into community settings by providing friendship, resources, and advice. Participants of the current study were over 600 residents of 42 Oxford House recovery homes. Findings indicated that willingness to share resources in the form of loans was associated wit...

Introduction: Our objective was to determine which symptoms among long-hauler COVID-19 patients change over time, and how their symptoms compare to another chronic illness group. Methods: 278 long-haulers completed two symptom questionnaires at one time point, with one recounting experiences during the first two weeks of their illness, an average...

We followed college students before, during, and after infectious mononucleosis (IM) for the development of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). We used network analysis to study relationships between pre-illness cytokine data amongst three groups of participants: those 30 who went on to develop ME/CFS following IM (and met...

Persons living with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) vary widely in terms of the severity of their illness. It is estimated that of those living with ME/CFS in the United States, about 385,000 are homebound. There is a need to know more about different degrees of being homebound within this severely affected group. The cu...

Background: Recovery homes provide supportive settings for thousands of individuals with substance use disorders each year. However, not all residents of recovery homes improve in these settings, and the reasons for both improvement and lack of improvement are still unclear. It is possible that those low in recovery might benefit when they are in...

The COVID-19 pandemic, resulting from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has severely impacted the population worldwide with a great mortality rate. The current article reviews the literature on short- and long-term health consequences of prior epidemics and infections to assess potential health complications that may be...

How does scene complexity influence the detection of expected and appropriate objects within the scene? Traffic research has indicated that vulnerable road users (VRUs: pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists) are sometimes not perceived, despite being expected. Models of scene perception emphasize competition for limited neural resources in ear...

One class of object recognition models posit that the brain extracts the global information of an object (e.g., shape) to generate multiple hypotheses, or "candidates," about the identity of an object. Additionally, context constrains and refines the initial candidates. If this is the case, is it then possible to modulate the interpretation of an o...

A degraded image of an object (e.g., a blurry picture of a mushroom), may be consistent with two or more possible interpretations (e.g., mushroom, an umbrella, etc.), even if one interpretation is ultimately chosen for recognition. Do these various interpretations all get activated in parallel or is the preferred interpretation the only one to surv...

In much of the world, fear of traffic crashes limits healthy and sustainable behaviors such as walking and biking. A possible root cause is based in perception: Drivers may sometimes fail to see pedestrians or bicyclists, increasing the probability that they will be crashed into. Here, we developed a method for directly measuring detection of vulne...

How do we use cross-modal cues to accurately identify the objects and scenes we see and hear? Furthermore, how do the different sensory processes influence each other in these identification processes? Participants were presented with auditory contexts for 5 s before a target object was briefly presented. Observers then identified both the auditory...